Ethnicity, Crime, and the Criminal Justice System

The ethnic composition of U.S. cities also had an impact on the criminal justice system. Urban crime and the criminal justice system were rooted in the city's "ethnic neighborhoods and were means of social mobility for persons of marginal social and economic position in society." ¹⁸ In Chicago in 1930, for example, ethnic groups dominated the city's underworld, and they also filled important criminal justice posts. Of the police captains 76 percent were Irish, and almost all pickpockets were Jewish. Municipal and criminal court judges were drawn predominately from Catholic, Jewish, and European immigrant groups. They had taken advantage of the opportunities offered in night law schools in the city to gain admittance to the bar and they ascended to the bench in party-controlled judicial elections.

The criminal justice system most frequently snared unorganized offenders such as juvenile delinquents, wife beaters, and drunkards. But organized crime, with its ethnic identification, captured public attention.

Organized crime involved labor racketeering and the distribution and sale of illegal goods and services, such as narcotics, gambling, and prostitution. It was a business. Crime leaders had to make a substantial capital investment, organize a regular payroll, and build customer loyalty. In the more corrupt cities, such as Chicago, illicit earnings poured into the campaigns of city officials and the bank accounts of police officers. There was nothing new about this connection between vice, crime, and political and police corruption. Similar practices had flourished in every major U.S. city during the nineteenth century. The difference was that what had been a small business then became a big business in the first third of the twentieth century.

The key to this transformation was the Eighteenth Amendment. Passed with the best of intentions, the amendment made illegal something that millions of Americans wanted, and may actually have made alcohol more attractive by making it forbidden. It worked, at least to the extent that it dramatically cut per capita alcoholic consumption. That success was purchased at a steep price. Prohibition opened up a business of enormous profit potential, and organized crime rushed in to provide the service. By the late 1920s, urban crime syndicates enjoyed revenues of more than $100 million a year. With the rewards so great, urban warlords engaged in mind-numbing violence. Between 1923 and 1926, for example, "Chicago criminals murdered an estimated 215 of their colleagues, . . . while the police killed another 160 suspected gangsters." ¹⁹ In 1929, Al Capone, the most famous mobster of the twentieth century, consolidated his control of the city's crime syndicates with the brutal St. Valentine's Day massacre.

The exploits of Capone and other mobsters, along with the fear engendered by the Great Depression, heightened the public sense of a collapse in law and order. Crime rates grew gradually during the 1920s, and accelerated more briskly during the 1930s. prompting the federal government, states, and cities to form crime commissions. In 1921, for example, Cleveland recruited Roscoe Pound, a proponent of sociological jurisprudence, and Felix Frankfurter to assist in a far-reaching study of the criminal justice system. Criminal Justice in Cleveland ( 1922) drew on sociological insights in reporting that the system was nearly in collapse. It concluded that a discretionary system of justice, in which plea bargaining was a central feature, had undermined public confidence. Similar studies in Missouri ( 1926) and Illinois ( 1929) reflected disillusionment, with most of the criticism leveled at parole and the basic assumptions behind the ideal of individual rehabilitation.

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Most reformers came from outside the ethnic and racial ghettos in which crime was rooted. They only dimly grasped the dynamics of crime in an increasingly heterogeneous society. Their moral values "were not shared by a number of their fellow citizens and their legal values were not shared by politicians and officials." ²⁰ Gambling, liquor, and even prostitution were accepted in many ethnic and black neighborhoods, and the police were under relatively little pressure to enforce vice laws on a daily basis. These conditions did not mean that there was an absence of concern with commercialized vice, saloons, crime, and official corruption. There was concern, but the criminal underworld (by virtue of its secure position in the social structure of major cities) was simply better equipped to manipulate the criminal justice system than were reformers (who were from outside that social structure) to impose change on it.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 630